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announcing the investment into clearstory data

i’m proud to announce kp’s investment in an exciting young company, clearstory data. you may have read about it last week, clearstory is an innovative company with seasoned people at the intersection of some pretty massive trends, so we are thrilled to be involved. i am leading this series A investment for kp and will join the clearstory board — and am also excited to work with investing partners andreessen horowitz and google ventures.

it’s no secret data is becoming more important. it’s past cliche, right? data impacts the large social networks. it impacts ad networks on the web and mobile. and, it even impacts governments and political power. we all know this. but if we focus on the realm of software for a minute (and there are many great data startups also working on hardware, servers, storage, etc.), the software opportunities in big data, especially at the infrastructure and application layers, are massive. with clearstory, the focus is on business analytics — itself a big category within data software applications — and fits alongside other great startups in this space, such as domo, platfora, and kaggle, among others.

the great coverage of clearstory data’s launch and announcement go into the product details quite well. on top of this, i’d like to personally highlight one dimension that excited me as an investor in the space. in addition to backing a great, small, lean, seasoned team with lots of experience in data, i’ve seen over the years, from my time at composite software to palm to twitter, and even at kp, that companies desperately want to leverage their data yesterday, but there aren’t many people with the requisite data science and computer science skills to help them. as a result, data functions and the data itself becomes put in a silo, accessible only to a few people. and, the most sophisticated tools in the space come at a cost, a cost that some larger companies aren’t as willing to incur. add to this security issues of larger companies, and most platforms run the risk of being stuck.

the reason i’m interested in a company like clearstory is because they’ve built out a product and modeled it to allow companies to simultaneously secure their data while allowing their people to leverage it with dead-simple interfaces. think of all the inefficiencies in modern work. the constant reporting, or seeing troubling trends too late. the data doesn’t lie, and a company like clearstory is on a mission to make data transparent, accessible, and actionable in today’s work environment. and, for me, that’s something i want to be involved with.